Cleaning Up the Community

By Matthew Liptak

Volunteers hit the road in Severn last weekend to clean up their community. Their weapons of choice? Trash bags and gloves.

The cleanup is part of Project Clean Stream, an annual initiative organized by the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay to raise awareness about the importance of environmental stewardship. In other words, picking up after yourself.

If you’ve done more than one event involving cleaning up litter and trash, you’ll quickly learn there are some common items making up much of the Bay area’s trash: beer and liquor bottles, foam cups and containers, and tires aplenty. At the April 16 event, volunteer Mac McCandless, won the award for most surprising item: the top half of a basketball hoop, complete with rim, backboard and pole.

Forrest Gump may have related to the find—there is plenty of repetition in cleaning up after litterbugs and illegal dumpers, but all in all “You never know what you’re going to get.”

As one of the dozen or so volunteers for the clean up on Old Mill Road in Severn, I was able to haul out four trash bags full of glass, plastic bottles, bits of Styrofoam, plastic, and food wrappers. I estimated some of the bags weighed upwards of 30 pounds. They were just a small portion of the 40 bags the group of volunteers removed from the side of the road and flood plain of Severn Run, not counting tires and other items.

The cleanup was organized by the Friends of Severn Run Natural Environmental Area, under the direction of Lynne Rockenbauch.

Rockenbauch reported that 1,280 pounds of trash was collected in this small stretch of road between Telegraph Road and Burns Crossing.

“I think it’s just a lack of education,” says McCandless, who lives in Crownsville. “I don’t think they understand the consequences of what they’re doing. Once they dump it off their truck or their car, they forget about it. It’s somebody else’s problem. I think if people were dumping trash in their yard, they would understand.”

Volunteer Karlyn McPartland from Jessup agreed with McCandless.  “I find it very offensive that people could do this to their environment. I understand, once in a while a piece of trash can get away from you on a windy day, but people are not conscious of what they’re doing. They don’t care that they’re soiling their own nest.”

McPartland came to the event with Pat Brenner from Crownsville. Brenner is on a personal mission to be one of the solutions to the littering issue in the Bay area.

“Trash pickup is a big thing for me,” said Brenner. “I hate trash along the side of the road.”  Brenner regularly cleans up around her own neighborhood.

Roger Staab, who works as a ranger at Sandy Point State Park, said he enjoyed the extra time being outdoors. He provided tools for the volunteers as well as took care of any hazardous waste discovered. “I’m going on 40 years (as a Maryland park’s ranger),” he said. “I just like being outside.”

McCandless said he hopes more people will come to cleanup events like Saturday’s, and work together to police their own neighborhoods for signs of trash trouble. “If each community took it upon themselves to every so often clean up their areas, I think it might be better,” he said. “When I was young I threw stuff out the window. I was just as bad. As you get older you learn what it does to the environment.”

Find more cleanups at allianceforthebay.org.